Obama’s Spooks and ‘Russian Collusion’

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He's the man with a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is victorhanson.com.

You should go there regularly.

You should subscribe, even.

I'll tell you why later in today's episode.

Last time Victor and I were talking, he was at some safe house.

Who knows where the heck it was?

That's why they call them safe houses.

He's departed from there.

Victor, how long was your trip back to the People's Republic of Selma?

I just pulled into Selma, Capital of the World, five and a half hours.

It should have been shorter, but

I had trouble leaving where I was.

It was hard to get out.

If only there was a high-speed train to take.

Yes.

If we just had high-speed rail, I would have been here in 10 hours.

Okay.

Well, we are recording on Sunday the 20th, and this particular episode will be up on Tuesday, the 22nd.

Victor's been away for weeks, so there are a lot of big issues that people care about.

And one of them, of course, is

Tulsi Gabbard's release of documents with the Obama administration's conspiracy post-election 2016 to kneecap Donald Trump.

Same cast of characters we've heard for years, but Victor's going to give his take on that.

We have the Jeffrey Epstein endless,

I don't even know what the hell to call it, Victor.

Excuse me, Enemy Helleman Heck.

Stephen Colbert fired, plenty more things.

Oh, Ed Fulner, the great Ed Fulner,

one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation, just one of the heroes of conservatism passed away.

We'll get Victor's thoughts on that and some other topics.

And we'll do all that when we come back from these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor, here's the headline from Just the News: DNI

Gabbard sends declassified evidence to the Department of Justice for possible possible prosecution of, quote, treasonous conspiracy, end quote.

Tulsi Gabbard declassified a

boatload of documents and related to the Russia collusion in the 2016 election.

Here's from the article.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday, this would have been a few days ago from when we're talking, issued a press release stating that Gabbard had, quote, revealed overwhelming evidence that demonstrates how, after President Trump won the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, President Obama and his National Security Cabinet members manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.

And Gabbard said her evidence had unearthed, she had unearthed, had been forwarded to the Department of Justice for review earlier this month.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe also sent a criminal referral to FBI Director Cash Patel related to possible alleged criminality by Obama.

CIA Director John Brennan, a source

previously told Just the News.

Victor, Donald Trump last thing puts out something on Truth Social

hinting at

prosecution of Barack Obama, mastermind of this

intrigue.

Your thoughts, Victor.

Well, I mean,

this is this issue of justice versus revenge.

Everybody said Donald Trump said his revenge will be his success.

But at first gasp, you say, oh my God, you couldn't go after an ex-president.

Well, it's in line with what we've been talking about for years, that they set all these precedents.

They set the precedent that you can go for no reason but to Mar-Lago and raid an ex-president's home.

They set the

precedent that you could go after an ex-president with 93 endowments.

They set the president you could take a presidential candidate, ex-president, off the ballot.

Then we remember the Mueller investigation.

So everything, thanks to the left, is now under discussion.

There's no taboos, there's no prohibitions.

And then we get to the heart of the matter.

Why would

Tulsi Gabbert, when she found these intelligence reports, why would she send a criminal referral to Pam Bandi?

And she did for, I think, two reasons.

One,

there was a Dutch intelligence report that they had tapped into Russian intelligence, and Russian intelligence was kind of baffled because they had tapped in, as we remember, to Hillary's emails or her correspondence that were not secure.

And they had found out that she was funding an effort to blame the Russians upon Donald Trump,

on Donald Trump, that they were colluding, Russian collusion, Russia, Russia, Russia.

But what was interesting about it is the Russians didn't know that the Dutch had tapped in, and the Dutch were just kind of mystified.

Wow, the Russians are mystified.

We found out that the Russians are mystified because they didn't try to work with Trump to throw the election, but Hillary Clinton is apparently going to use that charge against Russia and Trump.

That was the first thing, and they knew that.

They knew that.

That was clear.

There's documents about that.

And yet they went ahead and presented Obama with an intelligence report that

did not mention that.

The second thing is the lower, the next level under Brennan and the CIA and Clapper in the Director of National Intelligence.

Yeah, I don't know why he oversees 17 or 18 intelligence agencies.

That second group, when asked to

expand on Russian collusion, couldn't find anything.

And yet, when Brennan

and Clapper, to a lesser extent, reported to Obama, it's under dispute whether they said on one occasion they couldn't find anything

or

they reported Accra or they didn't.

But in any case, Obama said that before he left office, he wanted this to be actionable.

And that set the precedent for Russia, Russia, Russia, that really ate up or consumed the entire transition period of Donald Trump.

Remember Mike Flynn, etc., destroyed his career.

We had all of November of 2016,

all of December, all of January of 2017, and then we went right in three months later into Russia, Russia, 22 months of Robert Mueller.

So if you just take out the name Barack Obama, you can say that somebody tried to destroy a presidential candidate, and not succeeding in that effort, they tried to undermine and overthrow a presidency.

That's what they did.

And the question is,

to what degree is it actionable?

To what degree did John Brennan

have in these handwritten notes that they're going to release, did he say, I'm not going to report this, this is

but what Tulsi Gabbard has been saying is it was clear to Brennan especially, but also to Clapper,

that their own agencies did not think there was Russian collusion and that there had been a report that a foreign agency

was reporting that the Russians themselves, among themselves, not for public consumption, were baffled why Hillary was blaming them when they had not colluded with Donald Trump.

And that was available to these intelligence heads, and they may or may not, but they probably did report that to Barack Obama.

And he decided to order as a lame duck president after the election that they go after Donald Trump and investigate that.

And that,

I mean, the election was over, so he was trying to destroy an incoming president.

So they destroyed all the precedents.

We would never have even talked about Barack Obama being the subject of a criminal referral, if he is going to be one, had they not said to us:

a state, local, federal prosecutor can go after an ex-president.

An ex-president, as I said, can be removed from a ballot.

An ex-President Holmes can be raided with impunity.

An ex-president

can be sued for

$400 million settlements with Eugene Carroll and Letitia James.

They set the rules, and now

they may be subject to

their own precedents.

We'll see.

Victor, I saw some ⁇

the dots don't easily connect for me given my general ignorance, but I saw some

ex-post about John Durham, the former special prosecutor, saying,

Why wasn't this caught on his watch?

Do you have any thoughts about that?

If not, we can move on.

I just don't think that in that climate he was going to get a fair judge or a grand jury.

I mean, he had Kevin Kleinsmith, remember?

And was it the same judge that I mean, Kevin Kleinsmith was a lawyer, an FBI lawyer, and he doctored at FISA affidavit, and he really destroyed the life of Carter Page because they knew in the affidavit that Carter Page had not been involved with the Russians, and they knew that he was actually a source working with the FBI.

And yet, he changed an email to get an affidavit from a search warrant from the judge to go after him.

And of course, the judge that sentenced him to a slap on the wrist was none other than Judge Rodsberg, I think.

Isn't that his name?

Same judge who is now the lower district judge trying to impede Donald Trump's executive orders, many of them.

So I think, but the answer is, I think Durham,

at that time when he was supposed to be,

he tried to be very exhaustive, but I think the judicial system, the grand jury system, and the people in his own investigation, there was nobody.

You can really see it with the DOJ now.

I mean, they just got rid of James Comey's daughter.

She's the one that botched the Diddy case, and

she left office and called Donald Trump a tyrant.

She's been involved in a lot of politicize, but the left is just shrieking.

But think about it, everybody.

If your father was the FBI director and he ran a 22-month investigation

about the incumbent president, Donald Trump, whom you work for now, and he tried to destroy him, and he took private notes of a classified in conversation with Donald Trump, recorded them,

memorialized them on an FBI device, and then took a third party to leak it, and then went to the president and lied to him and said, you are not the subject of Crossfire Hurricane, a federal investigation.

And he knew that was a lie.

And

he has been very vocal for the last

four years attacking the president.

And recently in this weird surreal incident where he rearranged those rocks or seashells, basically 86,

40, is it 8647, he said?

So he's basically calling for him to be either forcibly removed or some people interpret 86 as killed.

Why would you be in the why would you be there?

You're a politicized family.

You've been on record.

You don't like Donald Trump.

You go out of office and confirm that you're biased biased and call him a tyrant.

So good riddance, is my point.

And when Obama came in and Biden came in, they were notorious for firing federal attorneys that were not left-wing.

So they set the precedent.

What we're watching everybody in the next

three and a half years is

Joe Biden and Barack Obama set unusual parameters, and they weaponized and politicized the IRS, the FBI, the CIA, the Director of Natural Intelligence, et cetera, Pentagon.

And they set a framework which they thought would be only advantageous to themselves.

Never in their right mind did they think it was going to boomerang.

Now, Donald Trump inherited that apparatus and is going to use it.

And they are crying bloody murder, as they always do.

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Victor,

you know, thinking about John Durham and what he could achieve in Washington, I guess

if you are a leftist or a member of the deep state or whatever in D.C., given

some of the judges, given the

potential jury pool,

the reality of you getting convicted is is not going to happen.

It kind of may be like the South in the 1940s, 50s.

I mean, convicting a white man of doing something to a black person is just not going to happen,

given

how the story is.

I think we're down to what's going to characterize the last three and a half years.

I'm not sure that the Democrats can break.

I'm not sure the Republicans can break historical traditions and win the House.

I hope they can.

I think they have a 50-50 shot.

But for now, the left has no Congress.

It has no Senate, no House, it has no Supreme Court power, it has no presidential power.

It's on the wrong side of these 70-30 issues.

And

it's clinging to,

I guess you'd call it relevancy with district court judges.

And not just, there's 750 or so.

About 300 are conservative, or I should say, traditionalists.

So they're counting on 400 or so judges in key blue states and blue state grand juries, blue city grand juries, blue city prosecutors,

blue city juries.

And so that's all they have.

And I'm not going to belittle it.

It's a lot.

I think in some ways the most powerful people in America right now are these district low-level judges.

Because their attitude is, I'm not a serious judge anymore.

I don't care about my reputation as far as a jurist that I will be reversed.

In the old days, if you were

a district judge or a circuit judge on the federal bench, you were worried that to be reversed because it was a slap in your face.

It was not good for your reputation.

The more you got, they have the opposite view.

The more that I can be reversed by the by the Trump court, the Supreme Court, the more I'm going to be an iconic hero to the left.

So they're going to try to be as as edgy and out there as possible, and they look as a badge of honor to be reversed, especially by conservative circuit or especially Supreme Court justices.

So we're going to watch this for three and a half years, and we'll see what.

It's not a positive use of power.

They can't create anything.

All they can do is destroy and delay.

And that's what they're going to do.

Chaos is there.

It's so much like chemo.

I don't want to be light about chemotherapy.

I've had so many people, my family I've watched take it.

But it is a toxic drug, and it's designed to kill fast-growing cells.

And it does kill good cells, but the logic is it will kill the cancer before it'll kill the host, the patient.

It's a corrective, and that's what Donald Trump is doing.

It's much easier just to say, you know, 10 million people come in.

You might be good constituencies, especially voters under early and mail and balloting.

I don't know where they are.

We flew them in at night.

They're bussed everywhere.

Ha ha ha.

They're criminals, 500,000.

That was easy to do.

Chemotherapy is the, it's hard to find 10 million of them.

You've got to go house to house.

You've got to go into cities and fight with sanctuary jurisdictions.

You get attacked by

leftists like Karen Bass or Gavin Noosa.

It's the same thing with DEI.

It's easy to say, oh, we're just going to let this person go in by by race because we're going to address historical racism and we're going to bring back justice.

It's very hard to say, no, no, no.

We're going to honor the Constitution and the 2023 court decision and incur all that hate.

Oh, you're a racist.

Oh, you're trying to set the clock back.

Same thing with the military.

It's easy to say, you know what?

White privilege, white...

white rage, white supremacy.

I don't care if you have natural immunity from COVID and prior, you didn't get the mRNA back.

You're out, you're out, you're out.

And then it's very hard to say to people: look,

there was an investigation, there was no cabal, there was no organized white supremacy.

We do not discriminate by race or gender.

All of those ads you saw about pregnant flight suits and trans,

we're going to get back to what we're supposed to be doing, efficacy.

Your grandfather fought in Vietnam, maybe your father fought in Gulf War I.

You're a veteran of Afghanistan.

We want you back.

You are the people who died, as I keep saying, double your numbers in the demographic in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We need you.

That's a hard sell.

So what I'm getting at is the corrective for whether it's restoring deterrence after Afghanistan or trying to fix DI or fix the border is really hard.

It was easy to destroy stuff.

It's easy to light a match and blow something up.

It's hard to rebuild it.

So Donald Trump is trying to rebuild it and correct the Biden cancer with chemotherapy.

And chemotherapy, it's tough and it's easily caricature, but it's necessary.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, before we take a break,

let me throw out another big topic, and that's Jeffrey Epstein.

And I personally, Victor, have always kept not arm's length from it.

I always thought nothing much was going to come from this.

You know, terrible what happened to young women and all that.

I don't mean to make light of it, but I don't know.

We live in an age where we think kraken are going to be released and then they never get released.

So I have low expectations, but that's just me.

What are your thoughts about the dynamics of this?

I don't even know what to call it controversy.

There's two controversies now.

There is the one, the big one, and that is

some people,

Cash Patel, Dan Bongino, Pam Bondi, and others said that they had files that the Democrats had not released and they were going to release them and they used words like list.

There was never, I think, a list of

100 people who committed an

act of pedophilia.

There were

in various surveillances and various indictments and various convictions and various court hearings involving Jeffrey Epstein, names and testimonies came up from the women themselves, from people, and there was an array of very prominent people.

But the prominent people ranged from the minority who actually had sexual relations in an asymmetrical fashion with girls under

18, 16, we don't know quite

what you could call pedophilia, and those that were smoozing with him to get political donations that had nothing to do with with that.

And those who thought he would be cool to know because he was a flamboyant,

maybe a half a billionaire.

And those who were in the financial business.

And then the $64,000 question is, how did an ex-teacher without formal financial training, how did he become the financial advisor to all of these billionaires?

That's where he made his money.

He made his money saying, I will manage your money.

But

his prerequisites weren't impressive.

And the suggestions have been that here and there he entrapped people either with embarrassing communications or with videos.

And he had something on people.

And he said to them, I will be your financial advisor.

You're not going to pay me a bribe or blackmail.

Just hire me.

And, you know,

he got...

several billion dollars of money to manage.

And the cut for him made him worth, I think when he died, he was worth $400 million.

So it seemed like an open and shut case.

And then when people heard that Donald Trump, unlike the Democrats, and I don't know why the Democrats are making this an issue, since

they had the right to release it, and they obviously didn't release it, if it had been damning about Donald Trump, they would have released it, everything.

You know that.

So they thought there were too many Democrats, that it would be collateral damage.

They were probably right.

I don't know what

the anger is.

I guess the real thing is how do you separate the people who are actually engaged in a felony, having sexual relations with an underage girl, versus the people who were watching it, consorting with it, flirting about, and or had nothing to do with it, attorneys, business people.

There were names in there.

I mean, there was George Mitchell, remember him, the Senate Democratic majority leader?

He was mentioned.

There was Alan Dershowitz.

All these people were mentioned.

But we don't know to what degree they did anything wrong.

So Trump comes in and hears all this, and he's obviously got calls from people.

Da-da-da-da-da.

Don't do this.

Don't do it.

I'm a donor.

I'm a polician.

I'm a politician.

And

he's probably said, we don't know how to

wade into this and separate the wheat from the chaff.

And then

after he said he was going to release it, then the mega base revolted.

Oh, you're covering.

It would be at this point, just release it all, whatever you do.

If it's redacted, you can't release it because of a court order.

Let people have a freedom of information out and challenge that.

But just everything you have, release, and then let the chips fall where they may, and everybody in the public will sort it out.

So that's the big issue.

The second issue is that there was a letter, I guess it was in 2003, on the birthday

of Jeffrey Epstein.

Alan Gershowitz wrote him a letter.

I think it was 2003, so it was at least three or four years before he was indicted and the first timing.

So you could argue that these people saw him as a Randy, provocateur, kind of edgy guy.

Everywhere he was kind of ubiquitous in the New York social scene, flashing a lot of money.

So they came in contact with him, always had a beautiful new woman on his arm.

Ha ha, they made a joke.

So Donald Trump reportedly did two things.

He sent a typewritten letter, and it was an imaginary conversation between Jeffrey Epstein and himself.

I just don't think Donald Trump would type out a conversation.

And we use vocabulary like enigma, you're an enigma.

And then he signed a picture of a naked woman, and his signature corresponded with the pelvic area.

And the suggestion was that his signature may have been a facsimile of pubic hair.

So there's two things.

Can you show that Donald Trump actually typed this?

And can you find any example where he sent an imaginary dialogue, type dialogue, to anybody?

Or did he just draw a picture and

Ms.

Maxwell typed it up and made the folder?

She's not talking.

And the third consideration is, after the access Hollywood 10 years earlier, does anybody really care that at a time when Jeffrey Epstein was not charged with anything,

and nobody knew the depth of his pedophilia, and he had not been a subject of a criminal investigation.

Apparently, that Donald Trump, if it were true,

signed a Randy picture.

I mean,

that's all been

aired.

That laundry about Donald Trump, whether it was Stormy Daniels or Access Hollywood or E.

Gene Carroll.

You could have not got more graphic than the testimonies and the interrogatories and the Stormy Daniels, Access Hollywood, and E.

Gene Carroll.

It's all been out there.

And Donald Trump has said locker room or he's denied things.

So it's a nothing.

And

we'll see who turns up.

If the Democrats really want everything released, we'll see who turns up.

I think they should just release it all and just move on.

Well, Victor, we have a couple of people to get your take on.

One is the late Ed Fullner.

The other is the

fired or about to be fired.

Well, the show's coming to an end.

Stephen Colbert,

and maybe we'll have some time to talk about some federal defunding of PBS and the aforementioned California trains.

So we'll get to all these things when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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Lots of new viewers and listeners here.

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Victor, let's start off nice, nicely.

Let's talk about Ed Fulner.

Ed

came to DC.

He worked for Phil Crane.

He was chief of staff of the Illinois Congressman.

And then he went on with Paul Weirick to found

the Heritage Foundation.

And Ed took took it over within about a year of its founding.

And it is

a tremendous organization and institution that has done great things.

I think it's the center of conservatism.

And it's due to Ed Fulner.

He passed away last week.

I knew Ed.

I know you knew Ed.

I just thought he was an awfully nice guy and an awfully consequential man.

What are your thoughts about Ed Fulner?

Yeah, I mean,

he was from a different generation now.

He reminded me a lot of John Racian at the Hoover Institution, or maybe somebody like James Pearson, you know, who was the Olin Foundation,

and Chris DeMuth at AI.

They were from a different generation.

They were gentlemen.

They were soft-spoken.

And

people had a lot of respect.

And although they ran so-called,

they were you know they were

philanthropic organizations think tanks but they were center-right

they were not uh angry mean people and they were very

i don't know they were i i don't see the the next generation on either left or right like those people and i don't even see people on the left that were like those three or four people so ed was a a very sweet guy and he helped create what is now the modern heritage foundation and i should say i had had a conflict of interest in even talking about the Heritage because

I do a daily five to six minute daily signal video for

Rob Blewy at the Daily Signal, and that has an affiliation, although it's an independent and separate from Heritage.

It started as an offshoot or was in the

Heritage Communications umbrella.

But

Ed was Fulner was responsible for a lot of the success of the Heritage, a lot of it.

And every time I saw him,

he was

blunt.

I mean, he could be blunt, he wasn't wishy-washy, but he wanted to make sure everybody felt comfortable

and he set an example of how you treat people.

He didn't look past you to see was there somebody better to talk to, which could very easily have been the case with me.

He was truly a Christian gentleman, engaging guy.

Every time I had a correspondence, I had maybe in the last 10 years, seven or eight correspondence.

It was never, can you do something for me?

Can you do the, it was always, Victor, there's this person who needs help.

You know what I mean?

And he said, a bunch of us are trying to write on his or her behalf.

Could you, it was always about somebody else, and it was always somebody that needed some support.

Well, Victor, I don't think you would have too many good words to speak.

We just want truthful words.

That'd be good if you had about the next subject, and that's Stephen Colbert, whose show, The Late Show, is being canceled some point next year

to the great outcry of the left, which sees this CBS canceling the show as some sort of genuflection to Donald Trump and fear of Donald Trump.

But the show itself

seems to be losing $40 or $50 million a year and has its numbers

are just terrible relative to ye old days of late-night television.

Maybe that whole genre is going down the tubes.

Anyway, Victor, your thoughts about Stephen Colbert?

I don't understand Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon,

and especially Colbert, because the success even of a leftist like

Dick Cabot

was that they had an appeal, a wit that people that were conservative watched Dick Cabot.

But Johnny Carson, you got the impression he might be center-left, maybe, but he never knew it.

It was like what

Michael Jordan said once, why don't you speak up about controversial racial issues?

He said, Republicans buy sneakers, too.

And you just cut and lose half your audience when you do what he does.

And when they talk, the left says, well, he's the highest-rated

late-night talk show, but it's really not a talk show.

It's more like a nocturnal view with one person.

And he had this shtick, remember when he made fun of Bill O'Reilly, and he was supposed to be a

facsimile, or he was acting in character as a Republican

pundit newscaster.

But it's so old because it was always...

It was like that Saturday night skit when

they made fun of MAGA people as racist.

Remember that?

It was just so old now.

We're nine years into Donald Trump.

And can't you come up with a new idea?

You're still emulating or acting as if you're a Bill O'Reilly-like figure and you're going to be racist and sexist and right-wing and greedy and ha ha ha.

He wasn't funny.

The other thing is,

what is Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren?

Does anybody believe that

Barack Obama was ever the object of any of these people's jokes?

No, they were all partisan.

That was the whole point.

They were a force multiplier of Biden.

They never made fun of Biden's cognitive abilities.

So now they're saying, well, they have these lawsuits and CBIS,

and they're afraid they had to settle.

And now Colbert was making fun of the settlement.

So what?

It's a private business.

They can do whatever they want.

They can fire him.

And they said, well,

he was the top-rated

person of four non-entities of a failing industry that had no audience.

Johnny Carson

on one night had more than all of them put together by a magnitude.

And so Greg Gutfeldt came out of nowhere.

He didn't have the budget they did.

He didn't have

the experience they did.

And he's the number one late night.

talk show.

Is that because he's he's not, I mean, he's center-right, you can tell that, but he's funny.

They weren't funny, they were angry and bitter.

And Greg Gutfell has all different guests.

They would never put a conservative

comedian as a guest on any of those shows.

The other thing is,

does

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who criticize this, do they think that the government has a right to force CBS to lose money on this guy?

His budget was $100 million.

I mean, we have a,

if you look at all of our downloads,

we reach millions of people, but our overhead is this laptop, you and Sammy and myself.

Bedroom.

Yeah.

Massive studio.

I apologize.

I don't have somebody with a big neon background or I don't have a booker.

They either talk to me or Sammy.

And we have a couple guys that help with the engineering, but why does he need $100 million?

He was losing $40 million a year.

So CBS said, this guy's making fun of CBS.

He's hard left.

People are sick of him.

He's out of date.

He's a smart blank-blank.

I don't want to subsidize him for $40 million anymore.

He's not worth it.

And that's a business decision.

And Bernie Sanders, he said, well,

this seems to me like it might be politically motivated.

Yeah, it probably is.

As in losing money, losing money.

CBS might not say, I don't want to get sued by Trump.

I do not want to be an object of half the country hating my guts anymore.

I went through that with Dan Rather and fake but accurate.

We don't want to do that anymore.

We just want to do it.

We want to go over to liberal,

liberal leftists.

We want to be like Walter Cronkite,

where we're mildly and pleasantly biased.

We're never going to be be non-biased.

That's who we are.

But we don't want to be insane.

And this guy is insane.

And that's what they're saying.

Yeah.

You know, occasionally

on YouTube, while I'm watching this or that, the side will have some Johnny Carson clips will pop up.

So I check them out.

Actually, today, coincidentally, I checked one out, not because we were going to talk about late-night television, but it was Johnny Carson with Art Carney and Sid Caesar, and they all played instruments.

and it was just fun and funny and

having watched any number of these over the last year or two, you know what has never happened?

No one ever said anything to try to make the viewer or anyone in the audience

feel like a dope or be attacked.

It just never happened.

And you turn on ABC and Jimmy Kimmel, you know within 10 seconds he's going to be saying something that you are going to find personally offensive.

Yeah, I mean I used to, in in graduate school, I'd stay up, you know, two in the morning because it was read, read, Greek, read, read Latin, da da da da.

And you'd stay up and you'd take a break and you'd watch.

We would flip between

Johnny Carson and Dick Cabot, a couple of guys in our apartment.

We shared.

And Dick Cabot even would interview people like Buckley, Orson Welles.

He interviewed everybody, and he was witty if he kind of wanted to go repartee, but he was not mean-spirited.

And Carson was not mean-spirited.

And Jay Leno was not mean-spirited.

He was on the left, but he was not mean-spirited.

These people are different, this new generation and this mediocre generation.

So they were appendages of the Progressive Project.

Just imag if you believe that he went after them in the sense that Donald Trump is fighting lawsuits and successfully settling with the media corporate, you can see that he is not, as I said said again, beating that dead horse.

He is not in the second term addressing symptoms.

He's saying to himself, they have no political power right now.

They are not on the right side of the end, but they're exercising influence.

And that's because of the universities, the institutions, USAID, the media, popular culture.

I'm going to address those and bring them back to the center.

That's what he's doing.

Yeah.

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Boy, oh boy, have I been nudged by Mrs.

Fowler?

Knock it off.

Stop it.

Victor,

you know, one other thing about,

oh, what was it about the late night stuff?

Hmm.

It's past.

It's a dying industry.

It's not just people can stream or they're on, they have 500 channels on subscriptions.

It's just

it's nine years of this.

Trump is an ogre.

Trump is a this.

And then people have just said, you know what?

The guy that you tried to kill him twice, you being the climate that created, that lowered the bar of what was imaginable, they tried to kill him twice, tried to take him off the ballot, they tried to raid his home, and we'll never know really what they were looking for.

There was 14,000 documents and they only found, what, 102 that were classified.

So they were doing something

and they impeached him twice, they tried him as a pri just were sick of it.

Just get a life and go after

Joe Biden.

I mean, if don if it came that Donald Trump had pardoned people people with an auto pin, all these people,

and then all of his people that were called took the fifth

like these people were doing, it's just.

Well,

I know what I wanted to say now, and then we'll get on to NPR and PBS.

But it was that, you know, Bill Buckley, you talk about Dick Cabot, and Bill Buckley was on that show.

Well, Bill Buckley's firing line was an ideal platform for the left.

And there was a book written about Firing Line a couple of years ago where some folks from the left said that was the show that gave us the best forum.

Even though we were debating, and we may have lost the debate with Buckley, it was a forum.

There's no way anyone on the left would ever give anyone on the right a platform.

I saw that one, that famous one he did, remember, with Eldridge Kleiver?

I think the only difference was he wanted to make sure that he didn't pay Eldridge Kleber for appearing until he actually appeared because he was afraid he would get shorted, as I remember.

But yeah, he had everybody on there.

And it was...

What's happened now is that you have this polarization, but you don't have the polarized cross-examination.

I mean, Fox does a much better job in CNN or MSNBC.

There are people on Fox that disagree.

And there's host.

I mean, after January 6th and everything, it got kind of really polarized.

But

there's nobody that comes on, and then there's a pleasant...

You can't go in the view if you were on the right and go on there without having them scream and yell and call you names.

That's all it is.

Yeah.

Those days,

I remember Norm McDonnell went on there once and he was, he shocked them.

But yeah, there's a no conservatives, no non-liberals need apply.

Hey, Victor, we're going to take a break.

But before we do that, let's hold off on funding for PBS.

and NPR, but let's just talk about funding for trains.

And we've talked so much about trains, and you live it.

It's right down the block from you, these monstrous

Easter Island kind of

bridges to nowhere.

But the federal government has, Donald Trump has said no more funding.

$4 billion

that the state of California was expecting is not coming.

Any thoughts about that?

Well, I mean, Gavin Newsom is all angry, but he can't explain to us.

It's an act of commission and omission.

The act of omission is if you spend nearly $30 billion, it's going to be $150 billion if you ever finish it.

It will never be finished.

And you have three north-south laterals in California.

It's a north-south state.

You would want to get the 101, the I-5, and the 99, six lanes, three in each direction.

I drove five and a half hours today.

I was on the 101.

It goes down to two north of San Francisco, two.

And it's full of construction site.

I got on the I-5,

the I-5, and for most of the part it's only two in each direction.

Then I got on the third north-south route, all in one trip today,

and the 99, and there are parts of the 99 that are only two, they haven't changed since when we had a population of 19 or 20 million, the same infrastructure.

We have twice that 40 million.

We have 39 million cars.

This was built for 4 or 5 million.

So Donald.

What I'm getting at is that

by building this monstrosity, they sucked out so much of funding for freeways.

And if you go in all of these weird places, you can't get from the coast of California to Nevada.

You just can't do it.

You can only go from the 80 up by Sacramento.

And there were plans to go in here where we are, to go, let's say, from Fresno to Mammoth Lakes, or there were plans to go further south.

The Sierras are kind of like 1849.

It's an impenetrable barrier, especially in the winter.

There's only really one major all-weather highway that goes across it.

And the laterals are not safe.

I saw that, you know, when you're going down the 101 and it goes from 3 to 2, and you see a truck in the left lane and he's swaying like he's a hula hoop, and then you go around him on the right and you see him texting, but he's got a double trailer.

It's pretty scary.

That's California.

And that's part of

the blame goes to high-speed rail in part.

Gavin Newsom, all he has to say is he says, Donald Trump cut off $4 million.

Okay, here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to publish a white paper.

And the white paper is going to do this.

2025, September 1, here's where we're going to be.

Here's what we spent.

Here's what we need.

January 2026, here's how much we have progressed.

Here's what we're going to do.

But they don't do that because they have no intention of doing that.

As I said last time, if you gave them the Bakersfield to Merced 172 mile corridor and you laid the tracks, you did all the infrastructure,

you paid for all the imminent domain lawsuits,

and you just said, there it is, it's all finished, you run it, they would lose money.

Nobody wants to go

50 miles faster from Bakersfield to Merced than the Amtrak.

Nobody wants wants to do that.

And the other thing about these people is they all talk about ecology, ecology, ecology.

You go down to Kings Canyon and you look at Kings County, about five miles south of

May, and you see some of the most beautiful farmland in the world.

They just plowed right through.

Ancestral oaks, you name it.

So they're not, you look at some old ancestral legacy businesses in downtown Fresno that they had to go over and tear up.

And not that, I'm not

opposed to progress, but I am opposed to a boondoggle that destroys people's property and lives that has no chance of success.

So, what's going to happen to it is going to be the 64,

you know,

what's Gavin going to do with it?

Because

he can't raise taxes.

It's 13.2%.

He can't raise more energy because he's already got a gas tax.

He's already, he can't,

you know, have a surcharge on top of the tax because gases I just filled up Jack you know what it was five dollars and ninety four cents

that's what I filled up has that 65 cent thing come into effect yet yes it started I think it's the first it comes in increments I think the first cent and a half or two cents has already happened but with the fuel formulas six dollars and you say well Victor you live in the San Joaquin Valley where it's very cheap no it's five do ten cents

and so that's what we're dealing with And he can't answer any of these questions.

He goes to South Carolina.

He tries to campaign.

He gets into a verbal joust with Donald Trump, always an unwise thing to do.

He tries to mimic Karen Bass, but he never says, I am Gavin Newsom.

This is a timetable to finish this project.

This is the number of illegal aliens here.

This is how much it costs per person who's not a U.S.

citizen in California tax money and services.

Here's how I'm going to get the revenue.

Here's why we have 21% below the poverty line.

Here's what I'm going to do about

over 700,000 homeless people.

This is what I'm going to do about falling test scores where we went from the top 10 schools to the bottom five in test scores.

This is what I'm going to do.

So I'm going to do about the power grid so we don't have these brownouts.

I was here sitting at this desk right before I took my little trip and everything went out.

I was on a Zoom interview.

It just

and it was five-second brownout.

I had to wait.

The internet went out the whole thing.

That's happened two or three times this summer.

And how could it happen, Victor?

They've got these huge solar farms, square miles of them on Manning Avenue on I-5.

I passed them.

They look very impressive, yes, but they are very expensive.

They have to be subsidized.

They do nothing at night.

Now we're going to to be down to two refineries for the entire state.

And

they're talking about $7 or $8 a gallon or importing gas.

The weird thing about Newsom is he won't produce the natural gas that California consumes.

He will not produce the oil that they consume through gasoline.

He will not produce the electricity that they need, especially for Silicon Valley.

And so he says, we're too good to do that.

You know, we're 21st century utopians.

We're soft energy, soft everything.

We're green.

Oh, Utah, Oregon, Nevada, we want that stuff.

Saudi Arabia, send it to us.

Alaska, we're too good to cut trees down.

We don't believe.

So we drove out all the timber companies except two.

But we need that timber.

You send it here.

Just don't tell us what you did to get it.

We don't want to know.

We don't know how many owls you split apart when the tree fell.

As long as you use electric chainsaws, right?

And Saudis, we do not want to know what the ecological impact is of your wells in Saudi Arabia on fragile ecosystems in the desert.

That's not our concern.

You just get it here, and then we can say that we're green and we didn't have to lower ourselves to what you do.

You get your hands dirty, we don't.

That's his whole attitude.

And it's destroyed the state.

Then all he can do when he gets on TV

he goes kind of like this.

Okay, Gavin, you can, that's it.

That's the explanation.

He is the most unimpressive governor we've ever had.

He makes, as I said earlier, he makes Jerry Brown look like Pericles.

He really does

in comparison.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're going to take a break, the final break, and when we come back, we'll get your thoughts on funding cuts for NPR and PBS, and maybe something about federal workers when we come back.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, let me just bring the federal worker thing up first.

There was a report out

this week that 22,000 in the DC area, so D.C.

itself, Maryland, Virginia, federal worker metropolis, 22,000 less workers, and that seems to be, I don't want to say a drop in the bucket, but with these court rulings about allowing, say, the Department of Education to cut staff, et cetera, this is the beginning, only the beginning.

Any thoughts on that?

It's amazing that we were kept being told by the Wall Street Journal News Division that we were at this point, they told us in in March we would be in a near recession.

The stock market would have stayed collapsed, so to speak, inflation.

You look at the producers' index of inflation in June, it didn't go up at all, and that suggests that

a lot of stuff's going on.

We're losing all these federal jobs that I think were non-essential, but I think we're going to be much more productive and create more capital by streamlining the operation of government just by not hiring people and then are laying them off.

But more importantly,

I went to a lecture

and a government official said he believed there's $15 trillion, $15 trillion in foreign investment.

So what I'm getting at, we are on

a new frontier.

We've never been in this situation before.

We don't know the effect of tariffs because we don't know what the Chinese, the Germans, the South Koreans, the Japanese were making on this market, this huge

American consumer market.

By that I mean when they sold us steel, when they sold us cars, when they sold us penicillin, were they making 25% profit, 30%, 10%?

So

we level tariffs, I think it's on average about 10 to 15% across the board.

And they still

want to be in the market, and they haven't raised their prices, at least raised their prices.

It's evident in the Producers Consumer Index.

So it tells me they were making a lot of money and they can afford to do two things: pay a moderate tariff and still be price-competitive with American domestic industries.

We don't know what

$10 or $15 trillion, that's already starting to happen.

When they open these AI big plants, when they open, when they have new energy, it's got to create jobs.

Doug Bergham has been very public that he thinks we have $100 to $200 trillion of assets.

Now people say, oh, he's just going to

plunder the earth.

No, what he's talking about is using natural gas, using petroleum, using clean coal, using rare earth minerals, using timber.

We have a lot of assets.

We only look at our income, but we have actual assets that can be developed.

And then I don't know what the refect, it's a little here, a little there, but you add up taxing the remittances sent to foreign nationals.

You talk about the remittances.

The endowment tax on university, I think Stanford might be forced to pay $170 million.

You look at the difference between 15% and 50% on federal grants.

That's another, these universities might have to pay a couple of billion more.

There's all sorts of things that are going on, and that's not talking about the AI

revolution or robotics robotics that are going to increase productivity.

So what I'm getting at is, I think everybody

is starting to get very upbeat.

And you can tell it by the Democrats.

The more everything goes well, the more Hikem Jeffrey poses, Jeffrey poses with a baseball bat, the more that Spartacus talks for 25 hours, the more Jasmine Crockett just screams, barks at the moon about white privilege, and Donald Trump, I think she just said, is a Hitler-like figure.

Jasmine, if I ask you to

tell me what year that Hitler came in to office, if I ask you who was the Chancellor of Germany when he was the vice-chancellor, if I ask you to show a map of the Third Reich, if I ask you to tell me the people around Hitler, who was Heinrich Himmler, who was Goering,

who was Goebbels, I don't think you could name any.

You don't know anything about that evil man or the evil he did.

It's just a junk word for you.

Hitler.

So

that's.

That's a great junk word.

That is.

That's

tragic.

That's really quite junk.

Donald Trump's Hitler.

That's why I and

I I met an officer,

a very high-ranking officer.

I won't mention where or how, but I think he was very displeased with me because

when we got back to Article 88 of the Uniform COVID Military Justice, it says

flag offer uniformed officer shall not disparage in public the commander-in-chief.

And so when you had all of those four-star generals saying, ah, he's Mussolini, no,

he's on the wrong side, the D-Day beach, Hitler, or he's like Auschwitz in the cages.

I'm quoting directly, by the way, he's a pathological liar.

Ah, he's got to be removed.

These were our best and brightest.

And I

as I said to this person, would you please tell me how he was Mussolini?

Because you were argu these people were attacking him at a time when he was the subject

of what I think will be proved a vendetta by

Robert Mueller's group, the Dream Team.

And there was nothing to the first impeachment and then subsequent law affirm.

I haven't heard any of those people say

this

these people, Letita James James and Michael Coangelo, who worked for Alvin Bragg and Jack B were coordinated, this is Hitler-like.

No, they don't.

So it's

all they said was junk, junk, junk.

When Rosa Brooks wrote that article in 2000,

if you remember, 17, 11 days after Donald Trump assumed office, there's three ways to get rid of Donald Trump.

Impeach him, nope,

too long.

25th Amendment, z-zit, too long.

Coup, hmm.

Loyal, patriotic, brilliant officers forced to

act out a crazy order by a crazy madman.

Maybe they'll just say, no, I'm not advocating a military coup.

No, no, no, but you've got to keep it out there.

That's what we were dealing with.

And so,

you know, everybody's sick of all that.

Amen, brother.

Sick of NPR, which I never listened to.

PBS, which I rarely watch.

They're being defunded.

Victor, any thoughts?

As we ride off into the sunset here, any thoughts on

this great cultural moment?

Well, you remember what the head of the

Corporation for Public Broadcasting said the other day?

Our biggest challenge is the First Amendment and the misuse of the First Amendment.

And as I said,

they just did a documentary on Donald Trump, and there's a write-up about it.

This is after PBS is under scrutiny.

And

it's very biased.

Remember, everybody, the NPR poll taken 48 hours before Donald Trump was elected by 1.5 percent, had Kamala Harris beyond the margin of error winning the election by 4 percent.

If that wasn't a way to get people to the polls and gin up the vote,

so you know they do a few things, but do they need our money anymore?

No, they're very partisan, highly partisan.

They're

extensions of the Democratic or left-wing project.

And as I said earlier, when I first heard of Channel 18 in Fresno, you had three stations, CBS, ABC, NBC.

You had a weird little local station.

Everybody couldn't get it.

It was fuzzy VHF or whatever it is.

Had wrestling on it.

Remember UHF versus VHF?

Yeah.

And then you and then you had public television and there was no commercials and you got stuff.

You have all that now.

You can go on any subscription and get all the non-commercial you want.

So,

if it did not exist, there would be no reason to create it,

either.

The NPR organization.

No,

it was an emulation of European socialist television, you know, BBC and all that.

That was the idea that we're going to have a government megaphone.

And so, you know,

I've had some people lately say, oh, you should,

how can you approve of the decline or the cuts in Voice of America?

We need that.

Well, yeah, we do, but I think this administration's attitude was sort of, I don't know, resigned to the fact that they can cut Voice of America in three and a half years, but it will reemerge the same way it is as a government institution staffed by leftists.

That's who wants to control it.

It would be nice if the Voice of America was the Voice of America as opposed to the Voice of America.

You remember the journalist?

He was a man of the left, Ira Berliner.

He was fired, and he said, I think that was his name, correct me if I'm wrong, but he said that in the newsroom at NPR, there was 87 people, and every single one was a Democrat.

So what was hard about having diversity?

It's not hard.

They say diversity all the time.

They don't believe in it.

They believe that they're morally superior to everybody, and therefore any means necessary to achieve their utopian goals are justified post facto.

And

every time, you know, when you go across the country for 20 years and you give lectures at universities, corporate foundations, community groups, lecture series,

and you start to see a pattern, and I can say I've done this for 40 years, and I can tell you that,

with a few exceptions, of really, you know, kind of the John Birch guy is really angry and he starts yelling about,

you know, fluoride or something.

But the majority of questions that are hostile are all from the left and they're not reasoned.

They're not saying,

you know, I have a disagreement or would you please expand on this or could I offer?

It's, yeah.

So there are accusations at the outset, right?

Yes,

asking me about a week ago, do you get a lot of people that show up your house or are very angry?

And I said, not a lot, but when I'm in a public place, I'd say it's one out of ten or fifteen.

And I can tell you,

if I was going to stereotype or in generalize, I can see the person coming.

And it is a white male, excuse me, white female between the ages of 55 and 75.

She's got a very angry look at her.

She starts to see you in an airport or see you on a campus or see you in a store and she starts to look at you from a distance.

And she gets dot dot dot like jaws

closer, closer, and her mouth starts to go,

and then she comes up.

She doesn't say hello.

She doesn't say, I'm so much, are you this?

You say, you're doing a lot of damage.

Do you know what you do to people?

You know, those kind of people like you.

And the trap mega, you're doing a lot of damage.

And now I just say, thank you, Karen.

Thank you.

That's all I do.

That's all I say.

I just say thank you.

I had it happen not too long ago.

And

that's the type of person that's very angry.

and their attitude is, well, I'm very wealthy and I'm very cultured.

I have a beautiful home.

I don't drive a Tesla anymore.

I go back to my Prius.

And I don't want a development.

I do not want my children in a public school.

I want a private...

but it has to be a Tony prestigious left-wing school with a name.

I want my kids to go to Yale or Harvard and get a cattle brand on their rear end that says Stanford.

That's how they think.

And

everybody else is messy and garbage people and

clingers, irredeemables.

And why do they have to have all this new housing?

And why do they have to build these power plants?

And why do they have to build these freeways?

My Woodside home, my Atherton abode, my Menlo Park estate, it's all paid for.

It's beautiful.

But they just clog up everything.

They just make everything messy, these grubby people.

But I feel kind of bad about that.

So I'll say that I'm a leftist and I'm for the people.

And I'm one of those people.

I'll put a lawn sign in, but that's, that says in this house,

we do this or that, but please don't come to my house if you're one of those people.

I have people come to my house.

I'm very polite,

although I'm momentarily surprised.

All right.

Evekta, you've earned a nap, my friend, because you just, as you said, you've come back from this very long journey.

California Road Warrior.

I felt like I was Neil Gibson.

Oh, well, I've been on your street, so yeah, I get that too.

But you're still

battling the battle of

I don't think my operation worked out like it is.

I have a bad pain in the sinus where they cut the bone, I guess.

A person came up to me where I was not too long ago, a stranger.

He was an ENT, and he just said,

You're very anxious, aren't you?

I want to feel normal again.

You know, I haven't felt normal since the infection started March 1st.

But

he said, when you cut bone, it's a different story than you cut tissue.

End of story.

So he said,

don't think you're going to get better after two operations.

I had a little procedure operation last week besides the main one.

And drainage.

And anyway, he said,

what did he say?

He said,

one day you're going to wake up in two and three months, and you're going to get up and you're going to say, wow, I'm so happy.

I'm waiting for that day.

Yeah, wow.

Eeyore will be.

I'm praying to the non-existent Sanctus Naso.

Yeah, I told you the saint is St.

Blaise.

So that is the correct, yeah, St.

Blaise martyr.

All right, I have two comments I want to read.

They are off of YouTube, and we thank everyone who takes the time to write comments.

They do it on Victor's website.

Again, that's the Blade of Perseus.

Some people write me notes, notes, Rumble,

Apple.

But here are two.

Tilts at Windmills writes, I like the professor's plain way of speaking, no word salad, obscure jargon, or emotionally manipulative rhetoric, just names, dates, events.

Thank you, Tilts at Windmills.

Oh, that's very nice.

Yeah.

That's very nice.

This is very very good.

He's a Cervantes character.

Yes.

Windmills.

I wanted to get into windmills when you're talking about environmental stuff.

I thought he was going to say wind wind turbine.

Right.

Then Crows are murder writes, I love Victor Davis Hansen's old school way of never all caps using vulgar language.

It's so wholesome and gentlemanly.

That's true.

Thank you, Crows Are Murder.

Yeah, we try not to do that.

I'm on a lot.

You know what's weird?

Is

I try to do one or two other podcasts or interviews each day.

And I'm surprised that the number of people

across the political spectrum where the F word and the SHI, they have been regularized.

I mean, they're just, the politicians use them.

I just heard a politician in a lecture and he was using the word S-H-I-T.

I can't believe that.

That was.

Yeah, what gets me is God D because that's explicitly banned by God himself in the Ten Commandments, but you hear it at the drop of a hat.

No, it's very funny.

They used to have a bunch of farmers down here on the pipe, this communal ditch, and there was one who was sneaking in at night.

And my poor grandfather was so honest, and he would open up the gate, nobody could see him, so he would drain to secretly water four or five of his vine rows, and he would do it every night so he could do the whole 40 acres.

And my grandfather's press, he would get uh, he'd work so hard, he'd get there at 8 o'clock at night, and the summer he had all the water set, so he'd go to bed, so the pressure, and then he'd wake up, and the the water had only gone gone down half

the furrows

because this guy had taken all the pressure.

So they all met.

They used to meet 10 or 12.

My grandfather was Welsh, my maternal, and he was all red.

And he said, Now you be fair with me, mister, I won't say who he is, because there are families around.

And I'll be fair with you.

And he said, I didn't, you know, you're doing this.

And he said something that I'll never forget.

He's never, I had never heard him say the D-A-M-N, Damn.

He never.

He always said, Dickens, that's darn or what?

Heck, oh, what the heck?

He wouldn't say hell.

And nobody did.

And my mother never said that.

And anyway, everybody, he said, damn,

damn it.

I'm so mad at what you're doing.

Everybody stop.

Wow.

And they said, man, Mr.

Davis just used that word.

Dropped a bunker buster.

So then I went, I was there, and I walked back with him to the house where I'm living now, and he says, Victor, I never want you to use that word.

I don't know what came over it.

I'm going to get on the party line and call people up at a party.

I did not mean that word.

I was just so angry that that man is stealing from me.

I said, well, you could have asked me, and I would have said it.

Everybody says it at school.

And then he'd go.

We didn't have party party lines,

by the way.

I don't want you ever having one of those ugly cigarettes hanging out of your mouth, just dangling on the corner.

Don't, please don't do that.

And don't go to town and do that.

Don't go to town.

And so that was, I look back on that and I feel like he's watching me every day.

Yeah, well, he is, probably from a sweet, eternal place.

Hey, I want to thank the people who subscribe to Civil Thoughts.

That's what I do.

One of the things I do for the Center for Civil Society, Civil Thoughts is a weekly email newsletter.

It comes to you every Friday.

I write, give you 14 recommended readings, important, good, interesting articles I've come across the previous week.

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So go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

It's easy, and I know you're going to like it.

Thanks for those folks who write me and say such.

Victor, you've been terrific.

Thanks, folks, for watching, listening, however you consume this.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for watching and listening.